Mobile data transmission and data services are constantly making progress, wherein such services provide various communication services, such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, etc. In recent years, Long Term Evolution LTE™ has been specified, which uses the Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network E-UTRAN as radio communication architecture according to 3GPP specification.
Furthermore, network virtualization is used in recent technologies, which splits the conventional networks into subsets to be used, operated and managed by different organizationally independent organizations. The use of network virtualization offers flexibility in the development of future network architectures.
The technical field according to the present invention is a software defined network SDN for use e.g. in mobile telecommunication networks. Within the research of software defined networks SDN, a separation of the control plane and the user plane is discussed.
In the control plane, a communication protocol is used, such as OpenFlow, FOrCES (Forwarding and Control Element Separation protocol), etc, for controlling the respective entities. However, in current SDN environments, the serving gateway SGW and/or Serving General Packet Radio Service Support Node SGSN controller cannot signal towards the SGW and/or SGSN user plane that an IDLE procedure, such as a Packet Mobility Management PMM-IDLE and/or an Evolved Packet System Connection Management ECM-IDLE procedure is to be applied.
For improving energy consumption of communication devices and for optimizing data traffic, current wireless communication networks, such as the E-UTRAN network, employ an idle state for network devices. In particular, a user equipment UE is in a so called ECM (Evolved Packet System Connection Management)-IDLE state and/or a PMM (Packet Mobility Management)-IDLE state, when no non-access stratum NAS signaling connection between the UE and the network exists. In the ECM-IDLE state according to E-UTRAN networks, a UE performs cell selection/reselection according [1] and public land mobile network PLMN selection according to [2].